Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday January 24, 2011 @11:00AM
from the believe-it-when-it-powers-my-toaster dept.

Haffner quotes physorg which says "Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W....when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31."

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I think you mean by putting in Nickle and Hydrogen and getting out Copper and heat. The water itself should not have to be replaced as it just converts back from vapor after it cools and can be reprocessed. The nickle and the hydrogen on the other hand are replaced by the generated Copper.

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

Why would it be free? It still consumes Nickle and Hydrogen, while producing less mass in Copper. Please they still need to maintain the plant and distribution system. So sure the price of the copper might counter the cost of the Nickle and Hydrogen, until copper prices plummet, but over all there is a net cost in generating the final electricity.

They claim that they've had a reactor providing heat to a factory for two years and that they'll be shipping commercial reactors within three months. Still in the 'I'll believe it when I see it' category, but it's a much stronger claim than any other cold fusion announcements.

Yeah, it's a pretty ballsy pair of claims to make if you don't think you can produce. Three months isn't enough time to bilk investors on a scam either. They're setting up several items which could be readily falsified. Perhaps they will be, but there's either something here or it's the most bold fraud to date.

If it's working, then it's probably got more in common with a radiothermal generator than a fusion reaction. My guess (as someone whose particle physics only goes up to undergrad level, and is therefore probably wrong) is that they've got a combination of neutron capture and decay.

This would mean that it's really working by encouraging nuclear decay, rather than by true fusion or even fission. There's no theoretical reason why this kind of reaction couldn't happen at the energy levels that they're discussing, but the exact mechanism could be quite interesting.

While both Slashdot and Steam have achievements, Steam has better voice support and "cloud" storage for some game saves... so one could say it was a step up. The unfortunate part is that you have to buy your content from Steam where Slashdot spills it on the screen for free.;)

Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism. They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works. According to a press release in Google translate, the scientists say they cannot explain how the cold fusion is triggered, “but the presence of copper and the release of energy are witnesses.”

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

There is precedent. The "Father of Radio", Lee De Forrest, did not have a CLUE on how his creation of the audion (a device that allowed for what we think of as modern radio) worked. He would just pour over patents and mix up combinations of components. It took Edwin Armstrong, who came along and improved the device to explain how it actually worked.

Their only experimental result is their input/output energies. No measurements of copper, gamma rays, or anything else. It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it.

False.

The history of science is full of unexplained phenomenology. Sargent's Rule is one that comes to mind: the observation that beta decay lifetimes scale as the fifth power of the decay energy. Sargent simply noticed this, and published a paper saying, "Hm... this is odd..." That kind of thing is the foundation of science.

If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.

Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. There is no impediment to "doing science" on these claims unless the write-up is too poor to know what idea to test. Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.

Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.

Just because they haven't published a paper detailing their setup and results doesn't mean it's automatically bogus. Ask yourself: if you have the choice between owning the rights to a revolutionary energy production system that could make you a multibillionaire overnight, or the choice of putting your name on a scientific paper outlining the details so others can get filthy rich while you get a pat on the back - what would you pick? So, yeah, it may be all a scam, but the absence of a paper isn't much of

False dichotomy. They could publish a paper detailing everything and simultaneously file a patent for it. Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent.

Remember, the word "patent" means "public." There is no contradiction between a money making patent and scientific publication.

Just because they haven't published a paper detailing their setup and results doesn't mean it's automatically bogus.

Just that that's the way the smart money bets. They've got no theory and they've got no reproducible results (since they won't give anybody the necessary information to reproduce it). That means they got a whole lot of nothing.

Ask yourself: if you have the choice between owning the rights to a revolutionary energy production system that could make you a multibillionaire overnight, or the cho

But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.

The problem is the nickel metal hydride battery manufacturers have been screwing around with nickel and hydrogen for a long time on a very large scale without vaporizing the planet, so regardless of what is going on, scaling it up will probably be as harmless as a nearby battery plant.

This sounds like any number of hoaxes that have been perpetrated; be they related to cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.

The "inventor"/"discoverer" are the only ones who can repeat the process and always under their own conditions or in their own lab. On further inspection the man behind the curtain is always found instead of any real magic.

This sounds like any number of hoaxes that have been perpetrated; be they related to cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.

The "inventor"/"discoverer" are the only ones who can repeat the process and always under their own conditions or in their own lab. On further inspection the man behind the curtain is always found instead of any real magic.

On the other hand, if it is a hoax they could write books about it, sell videos online, claim to be suppressed and silenced, then retire.

That's not an absolute mark against them - if they really were trying to do something different and the thing just started kicking out power inexplicably then their paper may well look like crap. Not to say I believe them - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that - I won't be satisfied until (as the article heading says) I see one powering my toaster, but I have more respect for guys saying "Shit, we haven't got a clue, it just happened" than ones spouting demonstrably false pseudoscience like so many before have.

Of course, the better way to go about this would perhaps have been to send detailed plans and experimental records to colleagues at other universities and ask that they try to replicate it. Maybe steer clear of mentioning 'cold fusion' at all and simply ask if they get unusual excess energy readings.

It's probably junk, but hey, I'm holding on to the glimmer of hope that this could be a game-changer, just for a little longer!

That was almost my favorite part of the article. It ran a close third to this:

Rossi and Focardi have applied for a patent that has been partially rejected in a preliminary report. According to the report, “As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching.” The report also noted that not all of the patent claims were novel.

But neither holds a candle to this:

Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.

Just because there is no current explanation, it does not mean they are lying.

Now, the fact that they cant explain it doesn't exactly lend any credibility to the story. If I invented cold fusion, irregardless if I could explain it or not, I would have every scientist I could find come look at it.

It sounds to me like Pons and Fleishman all over again, except they were chemists and these guys are physicists.

You are correct. However, from the reaction and results this looks like chemistry as well. They have built a very expensive and not very practical chemical battery.

Reducing the layer of oxidized nickel in the presence of oxygen and hydrogen is an exothermic reaction that produces heat [slashdot.org] at about the levels shown in this experiment. This is chemistry they are doing. The hydrogen is combining with oxygen and producing steam. There are about 50ppm of copper in nickel and they are merely extracting it.

Now, if they're not only physicists but good enough to do what was formerly thought impossible, why is it that they can't explain it?

They should call up a mining engineer or just google the 'Sherritt-Gordon process' to learn more about what they are actually doing. What they are doing is seperating the nickel and the copper that occurs naturally.

Move along folks, nothing to see here. (I hang my head in shame as a physicist. But I will tell my parents that paying for a physics degree from a school of mining finally came in handy!)

Isn't that the case for almost everything? We have many "observed" universal behaviors, but did anyone really break the fundamental working to explain the universe? For instance, I think nobody has been able to explain gravity; I think they tried to explain it using a particle called graviton, but nothing was ever proven.

Moreover, many things were actually discovered before they could be explained. At one point, unless it can be dangerous (which could apply in this case), the fact that it simply works should be enough for most people.

Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object.

Great. What's space?

We use it to mean a coordinating medium (everything is within "space" and so, all being contained in the same area, they interact instead of passing through each other). Why is that warpable? Does the space have an equivalent of mass or energy (volume perhaps) that would have to be conserved, and if so, where is it going? If it doesn't have any such inertial equivalent, why does space only warp in the presence of mass--if physically speaking, there is no incentive not to warp?

He gave us an idea, but it's not an explanation until certain key questions are answered.

"Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism."

They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.

They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.

Assuming the device actually works, of course.

A better question, is why does their nickel-metal hydride "reactor" produce excess power that never showed up when the NiMH researchers did their rather extensive battery experiments in the past? News stories about batteries spontaneously combusting are mostly about lithium batteries not NiMH.

Now if it was common knowledge that NiMH battery plants occasionally went nuclear, then maybe their experiment would have some merit, but...

Those guys fell from the fraud tree and hit every single branch on the way down:

- Created their own, "serious sounding" journal for publication- Do not disclose the actual device they claim to have been running- Do not allow independent observation of the experiment- Experiment is an open system (making it SO easy to fake)- Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.

Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).

And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics" that have no fucking clue about science that will eat up their claims just because they are "anti-established science". Wankers.

True enough. I think you have gotten it down pat. Until it has been replicated it is all just fantasy.

And yes the "skeptics" do tend to be the worst kind of true believers.I had this discussion at work about UFOs. I said that I didn't believe that they where from other planet's and or star systems because.1. They would be so big and put out so much energy that every one would know they where their.or2. They would be so good at hiding that we would have no clue the where their.

Trans-iron fusion with ITSELF is not exothermic, but trans-iron with Hydrogen?In small amounts this might happen in stars, but by the time a star has anything more than trace amounts of elements up to iron it has exhausted its hydrogen so any fusion of other elements with hydrogen is in the minority and doesn't contribute to the stars energy.

- Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.

Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).

I do agree with most of your points, except about trans-iron fusion not being exothermic. This is true if both isotopes being fused are trans-iron, as iron is at the top of the 'curve', but when one is above iron and one is below iron, it will depend on their relative 'energy per nucleon', and that of the product. A few people farther up have done the sums and shown exothermic results.
The problem with this kind of thing is not the relative energy levels of reactants and products, but that of the transitio

Mod parent up. If it went over your head, read it again. Input enough mental energy to achieve comprehensive, then enjoy the ride down.

Another thing: the idea that there's no value in a reported result until it's been replicated is crap. There's value in the initial report if a stock market trader who acts on the information (that everyone else chooses to ignore) makes a larger profit in the long run (all averaged out).

Prior to corroboration through replication, you're trying to reach judgement on inhere

You joke, but it's actually a serious problem. If this device is real, then at the rate it consumes fuel any house can easily have a constant supply of 10kW with the current model, maybe 100kW in the near future. That's a lot of waste heat to dispose of. Writers like Clarke and Niven have pointed out that this is a problem that any advanced society encounters.

It hardly matters how it works. It only matters that is does work. Smarter people can then go about figuring out how it works. Let these people make the investment in a factory to build these machines. The DoE can buy one can test it. If it takes nickel and hydrogen and energy and makes copper and 31*energy, then we can all retire or join the United Federation of Planets. Otherwise we are just out a few thousand dollars; money that otherwise would have been spent to kill brown people for Jesus in a foreign land. We are all better off no matter what how it turns out!

For every nickel atom converted to copper, you need about 4 additional neutrons to make stable copper (they state there is no left over radioactivity). Where are those coming from? Those are probably harder to get than shoving the single proton into the nucleus, which is hard enough!

Not plausible. But repeatable results by independent investigators is always plausible. And they don't have that either.

From WP:"The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars" in Latin countries such as France. The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university."

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, and one of the few good universities left in Italy, specializing in engineering, history and medicine.

However, from what I understand these people are not part of any research group at the University; one of them, Focardi, is just a (now often absent) professor of physics there. He was also a member of a research group in Siena which also claimed they had had a "breakthrough" 15 years ago; and they claimed then that commercial exploitation was 6 months away...

The other "businessman" involved was previously convicted for (unrelated) fraud. To me, it sounds like yet another scam.

That's his point. You're getting out more energy than you're putting in electricity in this reaction, but it's combining nuclei into ones at a lower energy level, so it's not magic energy from nothing any more than setting fire to paper is.

What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.

Um, yeah, you are getting more any than you put in, unless you personally spent the energy to grow the trees instead of, oh I don't know, letting the sun do it!

...I just want to point out that the scaled up industrial process must work as well. Getting a full sized reactor running is as important as solving a problem in the lab.

Please get out of the trap of thinking of power as necessarily a multi-billion-dollar centralized utility. For many of the world's current and potential electricity users, a closet-sized user-serviceable generation plant with 3-4 kWh output (whether by solar, hydrogen, fission, or fusion) would be "full sized" for their needs, and also a step up in sustainability and reliability. To be fair, even the regulators, finance, and insurance people fall into this trap as industrial giants like Babcock & Wilcox and Toshiba keep getting railroaded on their advanced micro fission reactors.

but if they are getting more power out than they are putting in, does it really matter if it is truly a fusion reaction or just a complex chemical one? especially if the byproducts of the reaction are not hazardous.

How do you arrive at that conclusion? The extra proton comes from the hydrogen. One less water proton -> one proton heavier isotope. Although that does raise the question as to what source nickel isotope(s) they're using, since the most abundant nickel isotope is Ni-58, and Cu-59 only has a half-life of 81.5 seconds. The only persistent copper would come from Ni-62 (3.5%) and Ni-64 (0.9%). Most of the nickel would form transient copper isotopes which would then spawn decay chains (I seem to have lost my nucleonica account at the moment, or I'd check to see the net result).

In general: I'm not about to declare "Cold Fusion Is Impossible!", but I think these people are a long way from passing the burden of proof.

Correct. Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility, like perpetual motion - it can, in princible, be done. So far though, no scientist or engineer has worked out how to do it. The field is plagued with both deliberate frauds and overeager misinterpretations of results, and so far very little in the way of success.

I have, you get a chip with small channels and voids through which you pass hydrogen. On that chip are pulsed semiconductor lasers that create 'hot' fusion, on a very small scale. Doing it on a microscopic scale makes the energies manageable.

I am currently working on the funding to build a lab and hire some eggheads to implement the trivial details of my genius idea. I have already identified an ideal site for the laboratory inside an extinct volcano.

Its a great investment opportunity. Want to be on board with the first round of funding?

No, they're describing fusion, period. Traditional hot fusion is a particular subset of that, in which the method to combine the nuclei (not atoms) involves heating them up to great temperatures in a maxwellian plasma, so that the nuclei with the highest energies (far higher than the average energy of the plasma) can fuse. There are also some less pursued hot fusion methods involving non-maxwellian plasmas.

Cold fusion is fusion in which there is no bulk plasma at all (although in some approaches it is theorized to exist at extremely small scales). More often, the idea is that you use an alternative method to overcome or reduce the coulomb barrier. For example, one hypothesized method of cold fusion is that under certain conditions, electrons are "dressed" with extra mass by quasiparticles (such as phonons), leading them to act like muons and catalyze fusion events by dramatically reducing the covalent bond length.

Just because there is no definitive explanation for a phenomenon doesn't mean that it does not exist. We still don't have a complete, definitive explanation for high temperature superconductivity, but there's no doubt that it exists -- and there are a number of competing theories. There are lots of competing theories for how cold fusion would work which cannot be ruled out at this time -- many of them no more exotic than our theories of high temperature superconductivity (or even the accepted mechanism behind low-temperature superconductivity). At the same time, the evidence is subject to many different interpretations. The DOE's viewpoint on the subject is that research should continue to explain the anomalies, but no major projects should be launched.

If one really wanted to keep the technology secret, but still make a profit from it, one could just create an oil "refinery" that makes and sells gasoline. Yes, it might have incoming pipes from an upstream source, but those pipes never have been turned on. The oil is paid for but the upstream seller has never bothered to deliver on it. In reality, the gasoline being sold from the "refinery" would be CO2 pulled out of the air, dumped through a ton of energy expensive chemical processes, and then dumped i

I remember (vaguely) some similar claim being made in Utah back in the 1980's (or was 1990s? I forget).

Anyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.

Last I checked, Mr. Newton still has the last laugh. There was a bit of 'cold fusion' research awhile back that involved chasing bubble cavitation as a source of energy, but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no seriou

"Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about 'cold fusion' to a mainstream audience," said Jan Marwan, Ph.D., the internationally known expert who organized the symposium. Marwan heads the research firm, Dr. Marwan Chemie in Berlin, Germany. Entitled "New Energy Technology," the symposium will include nearly 50 presentations describing the latest discoveries on the topic....

"The field is now experiencing a rebirth in research efforts and interest, with evidence suggesting that cold fusion may be a reality." Marwan said. He noted, for instance, that the number of presentations on the topic at ACS National Meetings has quadrupled since 2007.

What happened is that to avoid the seemingly near-religious 'skepticism' displayed yourself and others, the actual scientists working on the subject had to refer to their results as "anomalous heat" and refer to the field as "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (LENR) to avoid controversy.

So while you are busy deciding if anyone is replicating the results or if the field is worth looking into, a great deal of serious scientific effort has gone into the field for the last 20 years.

The real problem with Cold Fusion is the implication that Tesla was right: energy is abundant and free to anyone who knows how to harness it. JP Morgan financed Tesla's experiments until his advisors told him about the true implications of Tesla's later work: no need for electric power companies, no need for massive investment in power infrastructure (financed with loans from Morgan's bank), no dividends paid to him by his utility companies. It was simpler to just "fix" Maxwell's Equations to eliminate the unknowns, and just train physicists with the simplified equations.

Remember what Max Planck said: "Science advances one funeral at a time." Wrong ideas die slowly, especially when large sectors of the economy are predicated on a certain understanding of Physics.

JP Morgan financed Tesla's experiments until his advisors told him about the true implications of Tesla's later work: no need for electric power companies, no need for massive investment in power infrastructure (financed with loans from Morgan's bank), no dividends paid to him by his utility companies. It was simpler to just "fix" Maxwell's Equations to eliminate the unknowns, and just train physicists with the simplified equations.

Yes, and the same advisors told him about the true implications of Ford's work: no need for horse feed comapnies, no need for horseshoe manufacturing, no need for buggy whip factories.

Free energy, if it existed, would be the biggest economic miracle in all the history of mankind, make no mistake about that. JP Morgan was certainly smart enough to realize that. He was also smart enough to realize that Tesla was a crackpot who had one good idea, three-phase alternate current.

The problem with most of Tesla's ideas is that they were just crazy speculations without any basis in reality, it's as simple as that. Otherwise any investor would be happy to finance him. George Westinghouse, for instance, bought Tesla's patents on AC motors, if electricity could be obtained at lower cost it would allow Westinghouse to sell more motors.

If the mass of the hydrogen plus nickel atoms is more than the mass of the resulting copper, the fusion will release energy. Let's check some values (source: Wikipedia).

So start with Ni-58 (the most abundant), mass 57.9353429 amu.

Add hydrogen: 1.00794 amu.

Total: 58.943283 amu.

Get Cu-59, mass 58.9394980 amu.

And you just lost 0.003785 amu - mass which has become energy. That's how you get the exothermic fusion.

The problem here is that Cu-59 is unstable with a half-life of just 81 seconds; pretty hard to detect. Though skimming through their research paper I found that they say that the decay results in other isotopes of copper, or even decaying back into nickel. Anyway if this fusion takes place, there will be copper left, and energy is set to be released.

Now whether this whole reaction takes place, that's for other researchers to figure out - "all" they have to do is "just" try to reproduce the results, which may not be easy. It seems something happens, and it may be interesting to figure out what it is. The amounts of energy they claim to have produced are significant, too much to be simply systemic errors. But what is going on - well that's nothing I can speculate on from here.

Cu-59, IIRC, produces about 5MeV per decay. Thats MORE then the energy of fusion you calculated. And at 81S half-life, with enough power the boil a significant amount of water, the reactor would be a complete hot-zone, radioactively speaking.You should see the Cerenkov radiation of all those gammas in the watertank...

You're correct about the Cerenkov radiation, but for the wrong reason. Cerenkov radiation is the result of a particle which is traveling faster than whatever speed a light impulse is traveling through the medium. Cu-59 decays via positron emission, which means a positron is emitted which will travel 99%+ c. The positron will quickly annihilate into a gamma ray. The positron is what will cause the Cerenkov radiation, not the gamma ray.

Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.

...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.

That market is too highly regulated. Now if they start squirting out refined aluminum for less than what other companies pay for their electric bill... Also "free energy" means infinite ammonium based fertilizers, watch that market too.

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy.:-)

In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".

The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.

I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.

In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi